Since the beginning of the new century, Texas has been on a largely successful economic run, which boosters have taken to calling the “Texas Miracle.” Between 2001 and 2011, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Texas’ GDP grew from about $763 billion (in current dollars) to about $1.3 trillion. Per capita personal income has grown, too, from about $29,000 in 2002 (in current dollars) to about $41,500 in 2012. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics documents a similar trajectory. The population is growing steadily and so is the workforce. Texas’ unemployment rate has been lower than the national average every month for more than six years.

In other words, after spending much of its history as little more than a resource colony — America’s leading provider of cotton and cattle, soldiers and oil — Texas has emerged as an economic and intellectual powerhouse, a place that is capable of leading the country.

That has, apparently, been unsettling for many of our friends around the country. Texas is America’s biggest red state, and the country’s most vocal proponent of limited government. Its rise raises the question of whether the United States should follow its lead — and for national critics, who see a lot of problems with today’s Texas, that is a daunting prospect.

As a journalist who lives in Austin and writes about politics and economics, this kind of debate is, sadly, my idea of a good time. With the humility common to most Texans I decided to write a book about why Texas is the way it is and whether it’s working. Here’s what I came to think: Republicans are right to defend the Texas model. The data is pretty hard to deny; either the model’s been working, or it’s a hell of a coincidence. Democrats, however, are right to say that the Texas model could use some tweaks.

It was a suspiciously bipartisan conclusion. It also sounds slightly self-contradictory, so I’ll explain.

The Texas model, to start: low taxes, low services. Texas has always had some version of this approach, out of preference or necessity. The early Anglo settlers of what was then Mexican territory had so many gripes with centralized authority that they staged a revolution about it. The people of the cash-strapped independent republic turned to the Texas Rangers and circuit preachers for ad-hoc security and jurisprudence. The state’s Reconstruction-era constitution effectively enshrined this limited-government approach; as soon as Texas’ Democrats got rid of the carpetbagging Republicans, they wrote a document that called for a weak governor and a part-time Legislature, and that established various barriers to raising and spending money.

Today’s Texas has the nation’s fourth-lowest tax burden per capita. It also has the third-lowest rate of government spending per capita. When Texans want to get something done, they often turn to the private sector for an assist. Dallas’ new Klyde Warren Park is a good example; the majority of funding came from private donors, although the city, state and federal governments chipped in nearly $50 million among them.

Just as Texans don’t expect that much from the state, the state isn’t overly dependent on the federal government. Although federal matching funds make up a big share of the biennial budget, in the 1990s and 2000s, according to an analysis by The Economist, Texas was one of the handful of states that sent more money to Washington than it received in return. Cheap we may be, but at least we’re not hypocritical.

Neither are we crazy; as the numbers above suggest, the Texas economy really has been doing well — and not just for the people at the top of the pile. According to recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, slightly more than a quarter of the jobs created in Texas from 2001 to 2011 fell into the lowest wage quartile. Fully 45 percent, however, were in the upper-middle and upper quartiles.

The economic data would be cold comfort if the state was incorrigibly substandard on other metrics, as national critics often say. But that’s not really the case. In terms of public education outcomes, for example, Texas may not be where we want to be or where we ought to be as a state — but we are improving from historically low baselines.

This is why I think that the Texas model has worked, and it’s no surprise that other states, particularly in the South and in the Midwest, have been taking a close look at the Texas playbook.

For progressives in Texas, those who would generally like to see the state invest more heavily in public goods and government services, these outcomes aren’t good enough. Texas notoriously ranks last among the states for the percentage of people with health insurance coverage and the share of adults with at least a high school degree; the poverty rate is worse than the national average, and conditions in parts of the state — such as the Rio Grande Valley, where the unemployment rate is in the double digits — are certainly nothing to brag about that. Texas should show more concern about such issues, they would say, particularly because our prosperity means we theoretically have the means to do so.

This has been the progressive argument for a long time, and Texans haven’t fully warmed to it; Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in almost 20 years. This isn’t because Texans are heartless; it’s because they’re pragmatic. A small-government approach has, evidently, been working for us — and despite what the state’s critics would say, it’s not clear, looking at the data, that a limited government has been less equitable than a bigger one would have been.

There is, after all, a logical connection between the size of a state’s government and the opportunities available to the people who live there. A bigger government spends more money than a smaller one, and therefore requires more revenue — and that money has to come from somewhere.

Suppose, for example, we had a statewide income tax of 5.25 percent, as Massachusetts does. The state government would be richer and we could, for example, easily expand Medicaid coverage to millions of people who currently lack health insurance. The costs, however, would be real. For a typical middle-class family in Texas, where the median annual household income is about $49,000, the tab would work out to about $2,600 a year. That’s a down payment on a car, or a year’s tuition at a lot of Texas’ community colleges.

Every state has to think about such trade-offs, and although it’s become a bit of a cliché to say it, one of the virtues of our federal system is that states have some latitude to determine the wisest strategy based on their own circumstances. The Texas model emphasizes openness and accessibility; the tacit message of the government, with its aversion to taxes and spending and regulation, is that the state won’t do much to help you, but neither will it get in your way.

For a contrast, let’s go back to Massachusetts. It’s one of the most affluent and educated states in the country, and has been for a long time. It’s physically small; its population is relatively old, not very diverse and not growing much. It’s no surprise that a state like that would follow a high-tax, high-services blue-state model, which may encourage stability rather than growth.

But here’s the twist. Texas has changed and is changing. In an enjoyable irony, it’s changing partly because the Texas model has worked. So while we should stick to the general contours of the current model, there are three reasons that the state would do well to think about some upgrades.

The first has to do with demographics — not ethnicity, but age. Texas is younger than the country as a whole; we have about 8 percent of the nation’s people, but about 10 percent of the kids. If your state has a growing school system, it’s bound to cost more money. (That is, unless we want to spend less money per student, as the Legislature opted to do in 2011 — which helps explain why the state is being sued by several hundred school districts.)

The next change is that Texas is growing. Between 2001 and 2012, according to the most recent census, Texas added more than 5 million people. Concurrently and relatedly, as mentioned above, the state was experiencing significant economic growth. Such growth is generally considered a good thing, but one of the consequences is that we have 26 million people living in a state built for fewer, and jostling with more and more truck traffic on the increasingly congested highways.

The third change to keep in mind is that Texas’ economy has changed. The state’s historic occupations — farmer, cowboy, roughneck, saloon operator — relied on skills you could learn on the job. That’s no longer the case. Texas is becoming a knowledge economy. Even the jobs that used to be unskilled, like welding — for some reason, you can’t spend a day in the Lege this session without hearing people talk about the state’s shortage of welders — increasingly require postsecondary training.

In other words, national Democrats should really retire that old jab about the Texas McJobs engine. As mentioned above, it’s wrong. More to the point, perhaps, it’s keeping them from making a more credible argument: The Texas Miracle is real. The result is that Texas is evolving. So if we want to keep this man-made miracle going, Texas needs to invest in what Joaquín Castro, the freshman U.S. representative from San Antonio, has summarized as the “infrastructure of opportunity”: schools, water, roads and — well, let’s start with those.

We should fund the state water plan and repair our roads. We should fulfill the obligation, one of the few articulated in our ramshackle state Constitution, to provide a fair and efficient system of public schools. We should stop comparing ourselves to California, the high-tax, high-spending state that is often cited as a cautionary tale. The goal isn’t to be better than California. The goal is to be good enough for Texas — a much higher bar, and we fall short.

The 83rd Legislature, which is in session, is apparently prepared to tackle some of this work. The base budget bill, which will be finalized in May, restores many of the cuts made in the great budget bonfire of 2011. It allocates additional resources for public services such as mental health care, where state spending has always lagged national norms. Lawmakers are also willing to draw down from the rainy day fund, which is well-padded at the moment; at this point, it looks as if voters will be asked, in November, whether the state can take $6 billion from the fund to pay for water and infrastructure projects.

All of that is good news. Although the Texas model has been good for the state, this would be a good moment to make some investments. In lean times, scraping by might be an appropriate strategy. In moments of genuine duress, “stop the bleeding” may be good enough. But seeing as how we’ve spent the past several years talking about our state’s economy as a man-made miracle, we should recognize this as an opportunity to build a better Texas.

No call for greater investment would be credible without some comment about where the money will come from. Borrowing is one option, although the comptroller’s office has been sounding the alarm about Texas’ combined state and local debt. Tax reform is another. The idea of a statewide income tax is probably unrealistic, but it would be possible to reform our existing approach. We might raise the gas tax, for example, or revisit the margins tax, which has never brought in as much revenue as it was supposed to when it was overhauled in 2005.

We can have this kind of discussion with confidence. Even if Texas does “turn blue” in the near future, the state will remain on the fiscally conservative side of the spectrum. Texas has really never had a problem with wanton spending, and no one, on either side of the aisle, seriously questions the value of fiscal discipline. As long as we have to have a government, and we do, it might as well be a mature and responsible one: responsive to current events, but with one eye on a far-off horizon.

Erica Grieder, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, is author of the new book “Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas.” Her email address is egrieder@texasmonthly.com.

To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.